Hi,
I’m Debra,
I take photographs of ‘somethingness’!
‘Somethingness’ was a word my friend Sarah coined when I started taking portraits seriously. “You don’t just photograph people, you capture the ‘somethingness’ of them,“ she said, and it kind of stuck with me.
I’m a people-watcher. It’s an introvert trait. We watch from the sidelines and we kind of live in our heads. We may not say a whole lot but we’re taking it all in, and what I take in most is somethingness!
Arnold Newman was a photographer I greatly admire. He once said
We don’t take pictures with cameras – we take them with our hearts and minds.
I totally get that. I take photos in my head all the time. The way a mother gazes at her child <click>, the indignant expression on a toddler’s face when his sister swipes his sweets <click>, that look you give your partner when they’ve just said something really really stupid <click>. Faces are fantastically fascinating to me. Did you know we even have a specialist area of the brain which is totally dedicated to recognising the human face and its expressions?! It’s official name is the fusiform face area. I call mine my ‘somethingness detector’. You can read more about ‘somethingness’ here.
Erm…what else do you need to know about me?
I’m nice…not scary…not even a little bit. Not even when I’m holding a camera…honest.
And actually I think niceness is an underrated character trait.
I love dark chocolate and cake and peppermint tea. In fact I could probably survive on that diet for quite a long time, with the occasional glass of wine thrown in.
I’m also a qualified optometrist!
Take a look around the site and if you think I can help you contact me and we’ll talk.
If you want to know a bit more about me you can visit my other blog www.seeingasiam.co.uk It’s all a bit more random, but there are more photos, and visual psychology, confessions and cake. See you there.
Debra
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